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Why don't the whole planet just use UTC+00:00 / Universal Time without time zones?
(programming.dev)
this post was submitted on 31 May 2025
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Sunrise at 06:00 UTC in one timezone would occur at 03:00 UTC three timezones over, I mean. The relationship between standard time and local, solar noon based time (sunrise, noon, sunset, midnight) is going to have a flexing relationship across different places on Earth. So if you're travelling or even communicating across timezones, you haven't fixed anything by using UTC since daily activities (sleep, meals, etc.) are still correlated to when the sun is up or not. Timezones communicates that daily relationship with time pretty effectively without having to do a lot of thought about it all the time.
Right, but I wouldn't want to keep my daily routine aligned to a different time zone than where I am.
Exactly. So why would I want to adjust my alarm to 3am after travelling 3 time zones? I only care about relating the time between two zones for real-time communication with people in the other zone. And I'm not getting up at 3am for them.
I don't understand what you're asking here. I'm saying if you kept UTC in every place on earth, you'd still have to relate those hours to a solar based local time. If you wake up at 6UTC in London and then travel to Moscow, the sun in Moscow would rise 3 hours earlier (guessing, not sure exactly what time time difference is). So if Moscow was also keeping UTC, they would set their alarms for 3UTC to wake up with the sun. If you travel to Moscow, you'd wake up at 3UTC with the sun, which is the equivalent of 3am London time, but is around sunrise locally. This is just how time zones work, so I have no idea where the confusion is.
I mistook your original comment about the alarm clock. I wasn't reading it as the clocks in all timezones being set to UTC and rather that you wanted to keep your daily routine aligned with the daily solar cycle of the time zone you left.
Ahh, no! I was agreeing with the top comment that using UTC everywhere would cause more problems. Glad we're on the same page now!